It seems to me that the only objective ways to rank elite colleges are by the number of applicants and the acceptance rate. Each application is a crowd-sourced vote, the time and application fee tending to weed out the marginally interested.
Any editorially-designed ranking system is subject to author bias: pick whatever combination of attribute values will rank YOUR favorite schools near the top; if your method fails to place Harvard in the top 5, tweak your formula until it does, otherwise no one will take your list seriously. Make sure some famous school gets the shaft because the associated controversy will attract readers; on the Internet such articles are called click-bait.